The Window Seat
by Anna-Cate
Summary: One-shot. How does James always manage to get what Lily wants? Well this time, she's fighting back.


The Window Seat

Lily sat with her arms crossed angrily in front of her chest, fuming silently.

She kept shooting disgusted glances at her dark bedroom, and then envious looks at the Head Boys room, followed by venomous glares at the Head Boy who was sprawled across the couch next to her, his nose (for once) stuck in a school book.

Lily had the feeling that he was hiding behind it rather than reading it. Her suspicions were confirmed when she heard a faint chuckling coming from the volume.

'Potter!' Lily snapped, not in the mood for James' shenanigans today. '_What_ is so funny?' she growled at him.

James' forehead slowly rose into view, followed by his eyes as he slowly lowered the defence of his potions book. His wide, cartoon like eyes would have been comical if Lily wasn't so annoyed. 'Nothing?' he answered, but under Lily's glare it turned into more of a question.

Lily shook her head to say 'wrong answer' and James quickly began backtracking. 'Nothing... _nothing_ is... funny' he fumbled to come up with an answer that would avoid what he had long since dubbed a '_Lily Rage'_. 'A-_paart_ from the joke that Sirius told me _earlier_, WHICH, he didn't finish. _Aaaand_, I'm going to go listen to the rest of it now' he finished, smacking his book shut, leaping up from the sofa, and sprinting out of the Heads common room. He breathed a sigh of relief when he realised that he had made it out of there before Lily exploded with jealousy.

Back in the heads common room, Lily had returned to her sport of flipping her gaze between her shadow filled room and James' sunshine filled one. That boy is so incredibly jammy! Lily constantly wondered how he had managed to snag the west facing room, so that the sun illuminated his room throughout the afternoon when the sun only graced her room during the hours she was attending class.

It took a while before Lily registered that James had left his bedroom door open. He normally shut it before he left. Of course Lily could always just open it if he left it closed, but that felt wrong to Lily somehow. Like him closing it was forbidding entry. She managed to convince herself that if he left the door open, it was basically an invitation to go right in.

James wouldn't be back for some time. He usually gives Lily a few hours to cool off when he sees she's angry. She could just go in and take a peek out of the window. Just for a little while.

Convincing herself that this was not wrong, Lily pulled herself up from the couch and wandered slowly over to James' door, trying to act casual and throwing in a yawn for good measure, but her eyes never stopped darting around the room, looking for any sign that someone might catch her breaking the rules.

She stopped when she reached James' doorway and stuck her head in to take a quick peek. She had seen the room many times before, obviously, but she had never stepped over the threshold since James and Lily had moved into the Heads wing at the start of the year.

Telling herself to get a grip, and that James had probably snooped around her room on many occasions, which strangely did not make her feel any better, she stepped through the doorway. When nothing jumped out at her, she let out the breath she hadn't realised she was holding.

James' room was messy, but in an organised, over worked teenager kind of way, as opposed to a slobby kind of way. There was various items of clothing strewn across the floor, the bed wasn't made (but neither was Lily's so who was she to judge? - _much_) and precariously balanced stacks of books were scattered around the room, but other than that it was reasonably clean.

Lily wasn't one to snoop, not even if it was Potter, so she headed straight for the padded window seat she had so often imagined herself sitting on.

She pulled herself up onto the ledge, and curled up into the cushions. She let out a content sigh as she gazed out of the window at the sun setting over the lake, casting a rainbow of colours across the sky. _At last_, she thought.

*~*~*

James peered through the portrait hole to make sure Lily wasn't still angry. It had become a routine of his whenever he entered their shared common room. Seeing that she wasn't there at all he indicated for the rest of the marauders to follow him in.

Pushing open his bedroom door James stopped dead when he saw Lily curled up on his window sill. _At last, _he thought to himself. She'd wanted to do that all year, and he could never quite understand why it had taken her so long to just _go in. _It's not like he minded. It was Lily. What possible reason could he_ have_ to mind?

Pressing his finger to his lips to warn the others to be quiet, he pulled the maroon quilt from his bed, and carefully draped it over Lily to stop her getting cold later on.

He tiptoed silently back out of the room to where the guys were waiting, and allowed himself one last glance at the redheaded beauty tangled up in his duvet, before shutting the door and allowing her some privacy.

**A/N: As you may have noticed, I'm not much of a third person writer. I am more comfortable with first person: I've had more practise at it. But as with so many writers on fanfiction, my main aim is to improve my writing, so if anyone has any pointers on how to improve my third person writing, or to point out where I went wrong in this fic, I would be really grateful. **

**Love, Anna xx**


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